Hmong man, Missoula resident who served in resistance hopes for U.S. intervention

 

From his telephone and computer at his home off Mullan Road, Lue Yang kept as close tabs as he could Monday.

 

Thailand was loading up some 4,000 of his fellow Hmong and deporting them to the Laos homeland they fled in recent years.

 

“My only hope is the (U.S.) State Department can do something to hold them and try to appeal to Thailand to do a little bit better on the repatriation issue before they send them back,” said Yang, who served under Gen. Vang Pao in a militant resistance movement that unsuccessfully tried to thwart the 1975 communist overthrow of Laos.

 

Journalists and independent observers were restricted to a remote outpost in Thailand’s Phetchabun province as the deportation process began early Monday – midafternoon Sunday in Montana, which is 14 hours behind.

 

The Bangkok Post reported that by midnight in Thailand, the camp was cleared and the last of about 110 trucks and buses carrying the Hmong refugees were expected to reach the Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge at about 1 p.m. Monday MST.

 

Thailand is carrying out the forced repatriation because it considers the Hmong tribesmen illegal immigrants. But Yang, like most observers, believes at least some are political refugees, soldiers or families of anti-government soldiers who escaped Laos in the last few years.

 

They fear persecution may await those Hmong, despite assertions from the Thai government that it has received “a high-level commitment” from Laos that the returnees will be granted amnesty.

 

Yang said that while his particular interest is for his Hmong people, “this is not good for any human being on Earth to force people into something like this.”

 

“This is something that we all have to look at. I don’t mean to save just Hmong people, but try to save human beings. That’s the big picture I’m looking at,” he said.

 

The Thai officer in charge of the operation announced that 2,100 of the camp residents had agreed to leave voluntarily. The army was trying to persuade the rest to go in peace.

 

By Monday evening there was no word of resistance or violence.

 

Even as the trucks were rolling, U.S. officials issued a statement urging Thai authorities to suspend the deportation. State Department spokesman Ian Kelly called the operation a “serious violation of the international humanitarian principles that Thailand has long been known for championing.”

 

Yang was among the thousands of Hmong who escaped from Laos after the communist takeover. He served as a liaison officer in Vang Pao’s army, working with Jerry Daniels, a former Missoula smokejumper, to coordinate the Hmong operations with those of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, which secretly supported the resistance efforts.

 

After the fall of Laos, Yang escaped to Thailand and eventually to the United States, where in late 1976, at the urging of Daniels, he and his family were among the first ethnic Hmong to settle in Missoula. Yang lived for a time with Vang Pao in a house near Big Sky High School. The general also landed in Missoula after fleeing Laos, and for several years owned a farm near Corvallis.

 

Vang Pao moved to California in 1982, but Yang stayed and has lived in Missoula ever since. He raised a family of seven children and worked for nearly 33 years at what became the Smurfit-Stone Container Corp. plant near Frenchtown. He’s one of more than 417 workers who’ll lose their jobs when the plant closes on Jan. 5. He is 61 years old.

 

According to Yang, the Hmong population in the Missoula area peaked at roughly 1,500 in the early years before diminishing as jobs became scarce. He estimated that 200 Hmong live in the area today.

 

Though he said he knows no one who is directly affected by Monday’s deportation, he still has an uncle, a cousin and other distant relatives who live peacefully in Laos.

 

“They’re just civilians, farmers,” he said. “They were not involved with the war.”

 

Yang said he is trying to contact some well-connected friends in Thailand to learn more about the deportation, and he has fired off e-mails to friends in Washington, D.C.

 

He called on the United States to put more pressure on Thailand to suspend deportation.

 

“We have more power than any nation in the world to say, ‘Hey, stop doing that,’ ” Yang said.

 

He has no problem with Thailand’s plan to deport Hmong who emigrated to Thailand for economic reasons, likening it to U.S. efforts to send illegal Mexican immigrants back to their country.

 

“But if there are some of them running for life, some high-level officials should be allowed to screen them and find out what’s going on,” said Yang.

 

“I don’t really want to say too much at this point in time,” he added. “But I sure do not like this information, and I do not like the act the Thai government is doing to the people.”

 

Yang said he does not keep in contact with Vang Pao and didn’t want to comment on the general’s announcement last week that he would return to Laos.

 

In a speech in Fresno, Calif., Vang Pao indicated he would meet with Laotian officials at the Freedom Bridge on Jan. 10 to broker an agreement for the safety of the deportees and the liberation of an estimated 5,000 to 8,000 Hmong reportedly still in the jungles of Laos.

 

But the 80-year-old Vang Pao posted a bulletin on his MySpace page on Saturday, saying the visit has been suspended indefinitely because Laos was not ready to negotiate.

 

A Lao foreign ministry spokesman told Bangkok news sources over the weekend that if Vang Pao returns to Laos he should expect to “submit to the death sentence that was handed down against him in absentia by the Lao People’s Court after the present regime took power in 1975.”

 

By KIM BRIGGEMAN of the Missoulian | Posted: Monday, December 28, 2009